Hello!
I am trying to set up a small WiFi router with access point in Fedora 30.
The router has the following installed:
- dnsmasq
- unbound
- hostapd
I am using iptables for managing the firewall and setting the forwarding of traffic. firewalld is masked.
Routing, DHCP, and DNS all work well on the wired interfaces (there is a public wired interface, and an internal wired interface), but wireless clients can not communicate with any node on the local network or the Internet (even ping / ICMP fails as though there is no connection). These wireless clients are given IP addresses by the server, but they can’t talk to other hosts, and other hosts on the LAN can’t talk to them either.
I have turned off hostapd temporarily as I have been unable to get it to start while wpa_supplicant is running. If wpa_supplicant is not running, the wireless adaptor on the AP does not get an IP address (even if I have a file set for it in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/, and in that case, hostapd starts but throws an error when the client tries to connect via wifi (it basically says received connection on interface [name here], but it does not have an IP address).
I have had a similar set-up working well with Fedora 27 for quite some time, though it went coo coo after a power outage. So I am re-building the wifi router now, with mixed results. hostapd worked well before.
I think the problem could be that the way network interfaces are handled in the most recent versions of Fedora means I have to do things somehow differently than before, though I’m not sure exactly how I should be doing things differently.
On my old server, I did not use network-manager and had ‘NM_CONTROLLED=no’ set in the interface config files in network-scripts. On Fedora 30, my wireless interface appears after ‘ip -c a’, but does not have an IP address unless wpa_supplicant is running (I can’t quite remember if I’ve tried it with wpa_supplicant off, and the interface file set with ‘NM_CONTROLLED=no’ – I should try that next.
Given the move away from network-scripts, and toward NetworkManager, I have tried my best in using nmcli and nmtui to configure my interfaces and to create and manage a NetworkManager connection on the server for the wireless AP. There is no X or Wayland GUI on this machine. The wireless connection profile is set with ‘Mode=Ap’, and type of ‘wireless’. I backed up the configuration file in network-scripts for the interface and moved it to another directory, as it appears that is the only way to manage wireless interfaces now (no config file for the interface, but a config file for a connection associated with it.
I think those are all the pertinent details. I feel that I am incredibly close to having this all working properly, but am missing one tiny detail in my set-up. Might anyone have any clues for me that would help me sort it? Basically, I’m just trying to get a functioning wireless AP set up at this point – the rest is all working.
At this point, I have spent many hours on this project, but feel I’ve now run into a wall.
Thank you for any help you may be able to provide!!!